


The Frozen Man

by jolly_utter



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Brothers, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Just some sad ice boys feels, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22119055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jolly_utter/pseuds/jolly_utter
Summary: Christmas brings back memories of John Hartnell's last week on earth, and Tom mourns.Written for the Terror Bingo prompt 'anniversary'.
Relationships: John Hartnell & Thomas Hartnell
Comments: 13
Kudos: 11
Collections: The Terror Bingo (2019)





	The Frozen Man

**Author's Note:**

> John Hartnell died 4 January 1846 and is buried on Beechey Island. 
> 
> Title is from James Taylor's song of the same name.

Tom Hartnell can feel the ache settle into his chest every December without fail. It’s their third winter in the ice. The crew attempts a sense of gaiety, even now, stringing up paper chains and singing carols. Somehow the efforts at cheer make him feel worse than the normal tedium of darkness and cold and routine work. As if he should be happy just because it’s Christmas. As if it isn’t thawing afresh all the memories of trying to summon up a spirit of festivity himself. As if these songs and decorations weren’t the things that filled up his brother’s last weeks on earth.

Tom poured so much effort into that last Christmas, trying by sheer force of will to drag John back into health. Every day he made the journey across the treacherous ice from their camp on Beechey island to where _Erebus_ lay frozen in off shore. He spent all his free time in the sick bay, and when John slept, which was often, he pulled out his gift to work on until his fingers got too cold. It wasn’t much, just a little pillow out of spare canvas, but Tom made it as nice as he could. Every stitch in the gathered ruffle was an effort to make the dreary cot feel a bit more like home, and a hope that this investment of time would pay off in a future for John.

They shared a bed when they were boys- too many children crammed into a small house, full of voices and laughter and the smell of food cooking. John always complained that Tom couldn’t keep still, even in his sleep, and they fought over the blankets constantly, especially on cold winter nights. Eventually, to stop his fidgeting and keep them both warmer, John would flop across him, keeping Tom’s arms and legs pinned with his own long limbs. Nothing made Tom feel so safe as having his big brother wrapped around him, even when he knew that the morning would bring the rude awakening of John yanking the blankets off and tickling him.

Mr. Goodsir waited until the day after Christmas to tell Tom that there was no hope- a hollow sort of kindness. All it did was colour the forced cheer of the day before with another layer of desperation, a deliberate blindness to the truth. Tom berated himself now for the hope he had let himself feel when John’s hollow cheeks creased with a smile at the sight of the pillow, the bit of appetite he managed when Tom fed him from a freshly opened tin of roast beef and potatoes.

“Almost like Ma’s Christmas dinner, isn’t it?” John joked.

Did that scrap of happiness mean anything now, when Mr. Goodsir’s kindly brow creased in sorrow and he told Tom that he must prepare himself for the worst?

From the first night aboard they slung their hammocks side-by-side, swaying in the darkness of _Erebus_ ’s focs’le, surrounded by the stuffy warmth of forty-odd other men and their noises and smells. Tom usually fell asleep right away, worn out by physical labour and the bracing cold air. But if he was restless or homesick, he knew he just had to kick the hammock to his right and John would reach across, ruffle his hair with a loving insult, and settle his hand on Tom’s shoulder, a comforting anchor as he dozed off.

The moment itself was strangely peaceful. Tom shed a lot of tears in anticipation of it, and a lot more afterwards, but there was an odd sort of numbness the night he sat clutching John’s hand, in the eerie silence of the empty, iced-in ship. It was like they were the only two people left on earth. John drifted in and out of consciousness, and didn’t seem to know where he was when he opened his eyes. He asked for their mother, for Mary-Ann, for Tom. When he heard his name, Tom’s heart clenched, and he stroked his brother’s hand and brushed the dark mass of hair back from his face.

“I’m right here, John, I’ve got you. Everyone’s thinking of you. We all love you. Stay with us, John.”

When John smiled at him for the last time, Tom didn’t know that was it until he heard the rattling, laboured breathing taper off. It almost felt like a relief, at first, to be free of that painful sound. John’s eyes might still open again, he might wake up and breathe easily and the colour come back to his pale cheeks. When John’s hand started to get cold and stiff, Tom let go, pillowed his head in his arms on the cot beside John’s body, and let the tears fall until he slipped into an exhausted sleep.

Sometimes, Tom is glad that John isn’t here to see how hopeless everything has become. The winter darkness feels like one long nightmare, with the ships trapped and that creature lurking out on the ice, hunting them. Tom sometimes lies in his hammock and thinks about putting on his coat, wrestling open the hatch, walking across the slippery deck and down the ice ramp. Maybe he would take a lantern to see his way across the pressure ridges, or maybe the moon or the aurora would provide enough of a pale glow. He could just walk and walk, towards King William’s Land the way he’d gone with Lieutenant Gore’s lead party, or out across the frozen sea. He could go north, back the way they’d come, towards where John was buried, though he would freeze long before he reached him. Tom knew how the ice kept meat fresh. Did John still look how he did the day they buried him? Tom imagined him unnaturally preserved, suspended in time like the ships trapped in the unmoving sea. If only Tom could make it back there, he would lie down beside his brother and never leave him again.

Tom wondered if John had watched Ma care for him like this, as a child, observing with all the dignity his additional two years bestowed on him. Their cousin John Strickland helped, giving Tom a hand lifting the now-cumbersome corpse.

“Goddamn long arms,” Tom muttered, then wiped his nose with a sniff. He guided one of John's arms, then the other, into the sleeves of his second-best woollen undershirt. He had to wrap a hand around John’s cold fingers to pull them through without catching. John was shaved and washed, his hair trimmed of the length it had grown out while he lay sick.

“Shouldn’t make him too tidy,” Strickland said, “he won’t look like himself.”

Tom was grateful for the excuse to give a weak laugh. His throat still felt raw from shouting at the doctors, and at Lieutenant Gore holding him back in the doorway of the sickbay. His eyes were tender and puffy and he felt emptied out of tears. He was glad John was covered up now, so he didn’t have to look at the ugly long scar down his abdomen, hastily stitched up. They never should have cut him open. What was Tom going to tell their mother?

Tom unfolded his striped shirt, running a thumb across the initials he had carefully stitched into it. It was a good shirt, there was plenty of wear left in it, but he wanted John to have it.

“Help me lift him up?” He asked Strickland, and gathered up the fabric to guide it over John’s head. 

It gave Tom a scant amount of reassurance, as they lowered John’s coffin into the frozen earth, to know that he had left something of himself wrapped around his brother, that his head would forever rest on the little pillow that Tom had poured so much love into. It was an entirely inadequate repayment for how his big brother had always looked out for him, all the moments of comfort John had given him over the years. 

The ghost of John’s presence dogged Tom a little less over on _Terror_ , but it was never far off. As the anniversary of his death approached, the surrounding festivities made Tom’s heart weigh heavily in his chest. He was sitting on his own in a corner of the focs’le, darning a hole in his glove and trying to ignore the cheerful chatter from further aft, when the gunroom steward sidled up to him.

“Hartnell. Mister Hickey said you might like to give us a hand with something.”

Tom looked up at Armitage. He didn’t particularly like Hickey and his group of pals, but this at least sounded like a distraction.

“What is it?” he asked, trying not to sound too interested.

Armitage slipped onto the bench opposite him.

“He thinks he knows a way to stop that creature coming after us, good and proper. You in?”

The grim promise of the darkness and the ice called out to Tom. Maybe this was a way to help fix the awful mess they were trapped in. Maybe it was a way to find himself back with his brother. He laid down his stitching and nodded.

“All right,” Tom said. “I’m in.”

**Author's Note:**

> The show is somewhat vague about the exact timeline so I've placed the events of 'Punished, as a boy' around Christmas time.
> 
> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> Find me on Tumblr @anadequatesir


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